Options for deploying standardized image to desktop & laptops?

I've successfully built a "base Windows 7 image" in VMware and have been able to verify that it's working great when deployed to various physical desktops (using Macrium PE). My current dilemma though is that I don't have a solid solution yet for creating the image and deploying it.

I've currently been using a Macrium PE disc (free version) to build an image and restore it to a physical box, but there's currently a couple of problems with this method so far:

Even though I've successfully added all possible NIC drivers to the boot disc, and can see them all being loaded when Macrium PE boots, once I'm in the PE environment, it doesn't see a NIC adapter at all.

We're currently testing with the free version, but we're not sure this is something we'd want to use, even if we could get this working with the paid version of Macrium.

I tried building the image using PING, but based on my experience with that software so far, it's not working (I can't even build an image, let alone deploy one with it).

If I go with a different software brand, the ultimate goal is to be able to have a bootable PE-like disc that will recognize ANY NIC in a physical box that we boot from. I'm also looking for a solution that's simple to setup and deploy. I know some people might love FOG for instance, but that is NOT an easy/quick solution to deploy/setup.

@DustinB3403 I'm not sure if all of our desktops support PXE booting or not (some of our workstations are old, so I don't know for sure).

As far as using the VM as the image, I don't follow what you mean :-S...

I could use WADT, but since I've never used it before, it seems like that might be a lot of extra work to get it up and running (especially since I'd have to build a server for it, even if it was a virtual server). I like the simplicity of our PC techs being able to boot from a PE disc, map a drive to the network, and restore the pre-built image.

@DustinB3403 I'm not sure if all of our desktops support PXE booting or not (some of our workstations are old, so I don't know for sure).
I like the simplicity of our PC techs being able to boot from a PE disc, map a drive to the network, and restore the pre-built image.

@DustinB3403 Right, PXE booting essentially works the same way as how we're currently doing it. But it's a whole 'nother ball of wax. If I go the route of PXE booting, I'd have to make sure that all of our hardware supports it, and I'd have to still learn how to deploy using PXE boot (what would I use to build the image? what "server" would I use to host and deploy the image? etc)

You'll be building on the skills that the next tool kit for 10 needs (I've not looked into it).

Or...

You can bite the bullet and use FOG, which is a pain in the arse to get going and learn if you're not super familiar with it or similar. The pay off with FOG is it will deploy ANY operating system. Moving to win10? Meh. Moving to win11? Meh. etc.

I like this, lol: (https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=New_Home_Page#Hardware)
Requirements
Hardware
FOG is best implemented on a dedicated server, any spare machine you have. We recommend that you have sufficient hard drive space as each image you make is usually between 5 and 10 GB and it's best to have a gigabit NIC with as much processor and RAM you can throw at it.

Wow, that's SO helpful of them to tell me exactly how much CPU, RAM and HD resources to throw at my server, lol!

I like this, lol: (https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=New_Home_Page#Hardware)
Requirements
Hardware
FOG is best implemented on a dedicated server, any spare machine you have. We recommend that you have sufficient hard drive space as each image you make is usually between 5 and 10 GB and it's best to have a gigabit NIC with as much processor and RAM you can throw at it.

Wow, that's SO helpful of them to tell me exactly how much CPU, RAM and HD resources to throw at my server, lol!

You can disregard the dedicated hardware, I ran this at my last place as a VM on XenServer 6.5. I did have a dedicated NIC for a separate DHCP server that was running within the VM though.

This way I only had a single cable coming out of this NIC to my office, that had a 8 port switch so I could PXE boot, and image up to 7 computers at once.

I was getting NL-Gbe performance while deploying an image to my hardware.

FOG ended up being just the ticket! It was easy to deploy, easy to configure, and I already had a base VM ready to go for image capture. Capturing and deploying the image was a breeze and took about 60 minutes total (not bad at all for the size of the base image and the speed of our infrastructure).

Thanks for taking me into giving it a try - it was well worth the time!

FOG ended up being just the ticket! It was easy to deploy, easy to configure, and I already had a base VM ready to go for image capture. Capturing and deploying the image was a breeze and took about 60 minutes total (not bad at all for the size of the base image and the speed of our infrastructure).

Thanks for taking me into giving it a try - it was well worth the time!

Sounds like I need to go ahead and set one up in my lab. It's been years, so probably time for a self refresher anyway.

FOG ended up being just the ticket! It was easy to deploy, easy to configure, and I already had a base VM ready to go for image capture. Capturing and deploying the image was a breeze and took about 60 minutes total (not bad at all for the size of the base image and the speed of our infrastructure).

Thanks for taking me into giving it a try - it was well worth the time!

@aaronstuder Hey Aaron - yep, I stated in my previous post that it was strictly for testing purposes (to determine if Macrium was going to work for me or not). And as Dustin stated, I ended up going with FOG anyway.